‘Jan Němec’s first three features—made in a creative flurry between 1964 and 1967—are pared-down, taut, fatless movies. Taken together, they can be seen as a central source text for the Czech New Wave, of which Němec is one of the founding fathers. The films have, among other things, the same brand of slapdash anarchism as Věra Chytilová’s Daisies; the same clipped, elliptical approach to storytelling as František Vláčil’s The White Dove; and—at least in the case of Martyrs of Love—the same sensitivity to the pangs and pitfalls of first-blush romance as Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains. But where his New Wave colleagues (Vláčil and Chytilová in particular) tended to aspire to a kind of filmed poetry, in which each image feels as if it’s always wrestling out of its narrative context, Němec seems most at home making the cinematic equivalent of novellas. The longest of these features runs for 71 minutes. Two mostly forgo character names and spoken dialogue. All three take place in worlds that feel closed-off, decontextualized, and hyper-pressurized. In Němec’s cinema, abstract questions—What makes us free? What, if anything, serves as a stable basis for political authority? What makes us unfree: ourselves or others?—are borne concretely out in the movement of bodies: at some moments penned chafingly in, at others set in nervous, unstable motion.

‘Diamonds of the Night, Němec’s debut feature, begins in the latter mode. Its opening images—of two nameless young men sprinting desperately through a field, fleeing from a pack of invisible pursuers as gunshots echo in the near distance—waste no time building momentum or laying down exposition. The effect is startling: it’s as if the film has been playing for an hour already and we, its dozing viewers, were just now snapping back into focus. Němec’s handheld camera darts beside the two teenagers like a third, slightly burlier runaway urging them to pick up the pace, threatening to leave them behind. It’s immediately evident that they’re running for their lives—which, it soon becomes clear, means that they’re running primarily for the freedom to keep running.

‘The boys’ emaciated bodies, the flashback that finds them huddled against the wall of a cattle car surrounded by fellow prisoners, and the “KL” (Konzentrationslager) scrawled in white paint on the backs of their coats place the film unambiguously in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, but Diamonds of the Night is too single-minded in its focus and too narrow in its scope to work as a historical evocation. Instead, it’s a string of concrete episodes (treks through the forest, chance run-ins with local farmers, train-car escapes, encounters with childhood sweethearts, the discovery of a swarm of ants crawling on an eye socket or a hand)—some present, some past, some real, some imagined, and some alternate versions of the same events, all given equal weight by Němec’s breathless, associative editing.

‘On one hand, the film often seems to be playing out inside the heads of its rattled heroes; on the other, the present dangers are clearly, nerve-wrackingly real. Němec would set his characters’ subjectivity almost entirely aside for his second feature, then dive fully into their heads in his third; here, he’s operating in a slippery middle ground between those two extremes. The film’s final passage is one of Němec’s most disturbing (and morbidly funny) screeds on power and its abuses—the boys are taken prisoner by a gang of armed, degenerate old men, who soon burst into a gluttonous sing- and dance-along in the presence of their starved captives—but it also permanently collapses the shaky boundary between these victims’ inner and outer lives. The film ends more or less where it began, only now the forest has been transformed from a site of literal, life-or-death struggle to a kind of shadowy mental theater: there’s no struggle, no momentum, only inconclusive drift. Forget “historical context,” Němec seems to say, forget even the distinction between reality and dream, and eventually you’ll arrive at a kind of distilled emotional truth.

‘A Report on the Party and the Guests, made in 1966 but released two years later, is widely considered Němec’s most politically charged film—partly thanks to its expanded, bureaucratic-sounding English title (the original, as Michael Brooke has pointed out, would translate to something like “About a Celebration and Guests”) and partly because it had the dubious honor of being “banned forever” by the Czech communist regime in 1973. Indeed, the movie works spectacularly well as a allegory for the dark side of political utopianism: a handful of upper-middle-class picnickers are accosted by a band of jovial, bullying goons, then “rescued” by a well-spoken, white-suited man and welcomed to his outdoor birthday party—which, it soon becomes clear, they’d be well advised not to leave. Němec has a sharp ear for the kind of psychological manipulation practiced by regimes in his day: the appeal to social mores, peer pressure, and politesse to keep subjects in line; the presentation of the ruler as a kind of benevolent host figure; the widely proclaimed fiction that life under the state is a party and we all ought to be its grateful guests.

‘And yet it would be a mistake to read the film as a direct, one-to-one allegory. Allegories are always nudging their audience suggestively, as if to say, “You know what I really mean, don’t you?” The scary thing about Němec’s film is that it doesn’t seem to mean much beyond what it says; if it does correspond to some deeper truth, it’s not one that simply can’t be spoken aloud for fear of retribution, but one that can’t possibly be thought. In its terrible literalness, its strict commitment to the logic of absurd situations, and its abundance of memorable, stand-alone details, A Report on the Party and the Guests is arguably closer to parable than allegory: ultimately, it has less to do with this or that authoritarian regime than it does with the fragile nature of human freedom, and the capacity of people to let themselves be corralled within a certain prescribed system of thought, a certain pattern of etiquette, or even a simple traced-out line in the earth. Accordingly, with this film Němec traded Diamonds of the Night’s handheld, on-the-move shooting style for something at once more composed and more claustrophobic. The movie’s compositions are often almost imperceptibly off-balance, its cuts unpredictable, its tone a weird mixture of laconic humor and heavy dread. Němec has often cited Kafka as a formative influence, and Party can be seen as one of his most direct attempts to find a cinematic analogue for his literary hero’s deadpan, slightly stiff, disarmingly blunt prose style. With its unexplained-imprisonment scenario, the film echoes The Trial, but it’s arguably closer in spirit to one of Kafka’s Zurau Aphorisms: “a cage went in search of a bird.”

‘Between January and August 1968, the Prague Spring gave Czech artists a brief window of relative freedom, and A Report on the Party and the Guests finally received a domestic release. In the interval, Němec had already finished Martyrs of Love: a triptych of stories concerning the misadventures of three clumsy, inexperienced young romantics. Němec gives each protagonist a show-stopping signature gesture: the stiff, virginal, buttoned-up clerk of the first episode attempting to dance with a much less inhibited partner, losing his grip on her for a second, then standing by helplessly as she keeps moving to her own beat; the second episode’s young housemaid downing glass after glass of wine from her own drink tray as she listens to her aristocratic love interest give a singing recital; the awkward, unfashionable hero of the final segment being subjected to a forced wardrobe change by a gang of mysterious strangers (a twist that echoes both A Report on the Party and the Guests and Diamonds of the Night), and then, in the movie’s climactic scene, flapping madly around a young woman’s room in a bravura mating dance.

‘The movie is packed with authoritarian imagery, from the just-mentioned fashion police (three balding middle-aged men and two cackling old crones) to the firing squad our heroine surreally encounters midway through the second episode. But whereas the conflicts in Němec’s first two films boiled down, at least on one level, to bodies having their freedom of movement physically constrained by outside forces, Martyrs of Love takes place in something closer to a prolonged dream state, where external conflicts tend to act as surrogates for inner ones. In the first story, Němec cuts repeatedly back and forth between his bowler-hatted, dandyish hero and a succession of nameless long-legged women until the young man seems hemmed in by his fantasies; in the second and third stories, the protagonists find stand-ins for their own inhibitions, anxieties and unrealistic expectations in the form of menacing authority figures. These tongue-tied romantics are more than martyrs of love; they’ve become, as James Brown put it, prisoners of love. I’m not sure whether it’s scary or comforting that, after making two furious fables of political oppression, Němec chose to recast his heroes as their own oppressors. The upshot is that, for the first time, they can also be their own liberators.

‘Sadly, the same wouldn’t be true for Němec himself: shortly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 (which he filmed for the documentary short Oratorio for Prague), he was blacklisted from Barrandov Studios and forced into a prolonged artistic exile. That knowledge gives the last-act dance scene in Martyrs of Love a bittersweet aftertaste. Looking back, it seems to stand for a kind of artistic freedom that Němec spent decades struggling to find again (and which he would finally recover, at least in part, with a string of features this past decade): a loose, uninhibited combined movement of body and soul.’ — Max Nelson, Film Comment

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Jan Name @ IMDb
Independent of Reality: The Films of Jan Nemec
Jan Nemec, 1936–2016
Czech Director Jan Nemec Dies at 79
JAN NĚMEC: Enfant Terrible
Half a Century of Innovation in Film
Faceted Depictions of War: On Jan Němec’s ‘Diamonds of the Night’
Jan Němec by Steve Macfarlane
Invitation to the Party: Jan Nemec’s 1966 Satire of Czech Communism
Recalling how Jan Nemec changed history

 

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Extras

A Tribute to Jan Nemec: By Vincent Shkreli

Karel Roden a Jan Němec

JAN NĚMEC RETROSPECTIVE (trailer)

 

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Interview
from CER

 

CER: What was your notion of film directing when you came to FAMU [Prague’s film school]?

Jan Němec: Of course, I had no experience in film. I was 18, had just graduated, and it was 1954. At that time it wasn’t possible to get film experience, there was no video, as now. I was an amateur jazz musician, I played the piano and clarinet, and I was thinking about music studies. But at the last minute—after consulting with my father—an engineer, manager, a practical man who hinted that as far as making a living goes it’s better to be a filmmaker than a jazz musician—I decided to be a film director.

If rock-and-roll had existed at the time, I probably would have decided to do that, because it was fun, a free-for-all, no responsibility or career, just glory and money. Actually, my latest film, Nočni hovory s matkou (Late Night Talks with Mother, 2000), is a rocker’s confession.

The other thing that explains why I chose filmmaking was that I was temporarily suspended from school because of my bad behavior. It meant that the school didn’t give me a recommendation for studies at university. There was only one exception to this requirement: the artistic universities, where only an audition was required. So I decided on filmmaking.

CER: Was there any concrete, intensive film experience that made you interested in filmmaking?

JN: No film had influenced me, because there were no foreign films playing at that time. But there is one influence that affects me to this day. My father was a devoted amateur photographer. He had more than a thousand pictures, so I had some vague experience of photography. Photography follows me up to this day. If I can, I put it in my films.

CER: What sparked your conception of “pure film”?

JN: When I went to FAMU, I really applied myself. I didn’t go to the pub with friends. I really got hooked on film. And when I made my first two school films, Sousto (A Loaf of Bread, 1960) and then the feature film Démanty noci (The Diamonds of the Night, 1964), based on the short stories of Arnošt Lustig, I realized that film was an exceptional medium. It was about finding a pure film language.

There were only a few filmmakers who treated film like a special medium of storytelling. I was influenced mostly by the French director Robert Bresson, whom I revere greatly, as well as by Alain Resnais, Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. Their films could be told as stories, but the cardinal experience is from the film itself.

Film is in decay these days. Everybody makes films that could be a serial, novel, picture documentary, radio play or romance novel. Hollywood leads this trend of entertainment. The film profession is in deep decline, not only in our country [Czech Republic], but everywhere in the world.

CER: And was there any influence of Beckett or Pinter? Did you read their plays? Were they published in Czechoslovakia during that time?

JN: Yes. They were known. Usually, they were published in the magazine Světová literatura, where Josef Škvorecký was editor-in-chief. I read all of Kafka’s work and I wanted to film his story “Metamorphosis.” But I couldn’t do it here [Czechoslovakia], so I finally made it in Germany. But I don’t feel literally influenced by any of these writers. Pinter and Beckett were “theater” for me.

Perhaps Kafka was closest to me, due to his poetic character. But I think that whoever lives in Prague and walks through the old narrow cobblestone streets has to feel Kafka’s influence. So the influence is not directly from the literary work, but from the spiritual feeling. These are very mysterious things.

Just a short time ago I saw Renoir’s film La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939) and I realized that lots of scenes are similar to my film O slavnosti a hostech. It really looks like I copied it from him. La ègle du jeu was made in 1939 and my film is from 1966, but I hadn’t seen it.

The same thing happened with Buñuel and his film El Angel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel, 1962). There certainly is another similarity, and people say I copied it from him, but I saw Buñuel’s film about 5 years after the completion of O slavnosti a hostech.

I do not believe in direct influence, that someone reads a book that tells him how to make a film. But I think there are indirect influences that affect you even when you’re not aware of it. The mysterious and abstract characters of the film O slavnosti a hostech arose because of our fight against censorship. We would have had no chance of making the film if it had been more concrete. We used “over-stylization” to confuse the Communist censors so they would not immediately realize that it was aimed against them.

But they found something I did not think of. In the film there is the character of the host, played by our good friend Ivan Vyskočil. He was not a film actor. He had his own performances in a theater with his own texts, so it was hard to make him read the text from the script. And one of the censors said that he looked like Lenin and that we were making fun of Lenin and Leninist principles. After that, I realized that there really is a likeness between them. The censors took used this idea as a pretext against the film. I was very surprised at the time.

CER: After your return to the Czech Republic, your feature-length films from the 1990s aroused little interest from the audience and the critics. What was the cause of it in your opinion? Is the interest of critics and audience important for your work?

JN: In the 1990s I made three feature films, V žáru královské lásky (In the Flames of Royal Love, 1990), Jméno kódu Rubín (Code Name Ruby, 1996) and Noční hovory s matkou, which will be copied on 35mm film and shown in cinemas by the end of the year. The film V žáru královské lásky was very successful with the audience. 50,000 people saw the film in two weeks. It was number in attendance. But the film received crushing reviews.

In the 1960s it used to be opposite. Then, the first box office success slowly died down, because nobody cared about its advertising. Jméno kódu Rubín did not have a positive fate. Most of the reviews were overwhelming again.

There was a big problem with its distribution because a private distribution company that was supposed to advertise the film did nothing for it, so the film was hardly shown in cinemas and there was no advertising campaign. people could see the short version of Noční hovory s matkou on the Internet. Soon I am going to present it on DVD and after that it will probably be shown in cinemas.

CER: Which medium suits you the best?

JN: I liked the way my last film was presented on the Internet, and right after that or even during the presentation we had “questions and answers.” It was fascinating, because it was absolutely spontaneous. Not like press presentations, or premieres and parties. People reacted impulsively, some in a positive way, some very negatively, but always directly.

I hope I have the chance to make a film that will provide me enough money to live on so that I can make another film that people all over the world could see and tell me what they think about it. I presented the short version of my film on the Internet and then revised the film according to some of the opinions and reactions. I take it as a constructive dialogue with people. I think that modern communication will make people more interested in what they want to see. Not just applaud.

Communication is going to change. Everything will be transferred by electronic signals, over satellites that will be in accessible all over the world. Technically, everything is solved. I hope to live a couple more years, so that I can be a part of it.

 

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11 of Jan Nemec’s 26 films

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Diamonds of the Night (1964)
‘Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci) announced itself in 1964 as what it remains: a key early film of Czechoslovakia’s New Wave and a hard, shiny, multi-faceted gem that flashes in the mind without giving away its essential secrets — and that’s part of its secret. It’s not only possible for audiences to emerge from this movie without a clear idea of what happens in it, it’s virtually required. We’re left with existential terror. That’s a remarkable feat in general and especially so with a film that apparently has a happy ending.

‘The trouble and glory with Němec is that he’s interested in fragmentary, fractional, refracted and refractory narrative, based partly on his reading of William Faulkner and partly on his youthful excitement at the discovery of dream-and-memory in the films of Alain Resnais. Němec also responded to the meticulous, stripped-down, emotionless observational approach of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), one of the most non-melodramatic suspense thrillers ever made. (Another is Jacques Becker’s 1960 film Le Trou, indebted to Bresson.) In another bonus, critic James Quandt discusses these and other influences, from those in your face — Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) with its ants crawling on a man’s hand — to the more subtle, like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), which Quandt observes would make a good double feature with Němec’s film.’ — Pop Matters

Excerpt

the entirety

 

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Podvodníci (1965)
‘Included in the portmanteau film Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně, 1965), Němec’s The Impostors (Podvodníci) was a fatalistic ten-minute comedy about two elderly men in a hospital ward swapping typically Hrabalian shaggy-dog reminiscences about their allegedly distinguished journalistic and operatic careers. When death silences them for good, the hospital staff reveal the prosaic truth.’ — bfi

See the trailer

 

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A Report on the Party and Guests (1966)
‘Even under the relatively liberal 1967 Czechoslovakian regime, The Party and Guests was banned (at the same time as Vera Chytilová‘s Daisies) because it had “nothing in common with our republic, socialism, and the ideas of Communism.” The movie was briefly exhibited during the Prague spring of 1968 then banned again after the Soviet invasion. In the second round of censorship, hardline President Antonín Novotný honored Party and Guests by naming it one of four films that were “banned forever” in the dictatorship. The movie was filmed quietly and quickly in five weeks because director Jan Nemec was afraid that authorities would shut down the production.’ — 366 Weird Movies

Excerpt

 

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Martyrs of Love (1967)
‘This three-part ballad, which often uses music to stand in for dialogue, remains the most perfect embodiment of Nemec’s vision of a film world independent of reality. Mounting a defense of timid, inhibited, clumsy, and unsuccessful individuals, the three protagonists are a complete antithesis of the industrious heroes of socialist aesthetics. Martyrs of Love cemented Nemec’s reputation as the kind of unrestrained nonconformist the Communist establishment considered the most dangerous to their ideology.’ — letterboxd

Excerpt

 

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Oratorio for Prague (1968)
‘A big admirer and direct participant in the Prague Spring, Němec intended to make a documentary about it, capturing the first steps of Communist Czechoslovakia towards democracy in the late 1960s. Enthusiastically and even euphorically filming the streets of Prague full of unprecedented freedom and young people opened up to a new world, he could not expect that everything would soon be destroyed by the invasion of the Soviet army which would cover the same streets with blood and the dead bodies of young protesters. Peace turning into violence and chaos, as well as hopes becoming illusions and just nothingness, are the true subjects of this film which features the iconic images of Soviet tanks crushing the Prague Spring. That footage, shot by Němec and his crew without authorisation, was secretly transported abroad and immediately went viral, as it was widely broadcast by Western television and defeated the propagandistic version of the same events fabricated by pro-invasion Communists.’ — iffr

Trailer

 

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Čas slunce a růží (1968)
‘Karel Gott in the lead role of a music film by screenwriter and director Jan Němec. Karel Gott and his band recorded songs in natural Slovak scenery, without accompanying words or connecting events. Interestingly, one of the girls doing silent staffing in the film was played by the then Miss Czechoslovak A. Strkulova.’ — collaged

the entirety

 

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In the Light of the King’s Love (1991)
‘The film tells the life story of its director, Jan Nemec, one of the most known and important filmmakers of Czech New Wave.’ — IMDb

the entirety

 

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Code Name: Ruby (1996)
‘Jan Nemec’s mid-90’s love story follows a flight controller Michal and his mysterious partner Ruby in pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone, creating gold along the way. By reaching back into antiquity, our protagonists establish Prague as the seat of alchemy, sought after by foreign forces for centuries. In 1995, President Vaclav Havel rewards commandos of the U.S. forces that helped free Czechoslovakia in 1945, but Nemec posits that they also helped protect Prague’s alchemical secrets..

‘To some, this is primarily a love story, to others it’s a tale of cold war conspiracy, but primarily, it’s another one of Nemec’s odes to Prague. He argues for Prague’s importance in the history of Europe through Ruby, a symbol of the good St. Wenceslaus, a metaphor for the eternal fire which burns without flame. Certainly, the history of the Czech people have been a struggle of identity and independence in the face of European factions much more powerful. And Nemec unveils a specific spectre: the state of Nazi Germany. He notes their proclivity towards the collection of mystical secrets, and implies that it is achieved by a rape of the country. In the case of ‘good vs. evil’ it is the forces of Generals Patton and Eisenhower who vanquish the Nazis and recover the artifacts. Yet, not unlike those who discovered King Tut and died of poisoning in later years, those American voices (J.F.K., John Lennon, Eisenhower, and Patton are mentioned) soon met their end. Ruby is the spirit of Czechs, who were born once in 1946 under Benes, and revived using the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ in 1993 under Havel. Unsurprisingly, it is Czech independence which plays an active role in Nemec’s film.’ — Cora Berube

Excerpt

 

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Late Night Talks with Mother (2001)
‘Late Night Talks with Mother is a stylised selfportrait of the Czech filmmaker Jan Nemec, inspired by Kafka’s Letter to Father. A fictional dialogue between Nemec and his dead mother forms the soundtrack to images of Prague, following the route of tram 11: from the statue of Wencelas in the centre to the Strasnic crematorium, where the son goes looking for the grave of his mother. He wasn’t there when she died. Just like Kakfa’s hero from The Trial, Nemec was charged without apparent reason and had to flee abroad, an event he still regrets greatly and for which he asks absolution, sitting on his mother’s grave.This autobiography filmed on miniDV (in the words of Nemec: ‘Digital, but with heart and soul’) is also a journey past milestones in the history of 20thcentury Prague, such as the Second World War, the Soviet invasion and the presidency of Václav Havel. Late Night Talks with Mother is however not a documentary: Nemec is played by the popular Czech actor Karel Roden. Almost all Nemec’s friends and acquaintances perform in the film, including some striking cameo roles, such as those by Václav Havel, Saul Zaentz and Eric Clapton.’ — iffr

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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The Ferrari Dino Girl (2009)
‘Jan Němec returns to the drama of August 1968 when Soviet troops and tanks occupied his country, the incident that changed the destiny of the country for 21 long years. With an impromptu crew, the director (here played by his alter ego in many of his films, Karel Roden) captured unique evidence of random attacks, soldiers shooting, dead bodies lying on the pavement. The material was, however, worthless in occupied Prague; it had to be shown to the rest of the world.

‘So, while the Soviets concocted false reports for propaganda purposes of hearty welcomes without military resistance, the director set off with the footage on a risky trip across the closed Czech-Austrian border to Vienna with the help of Jana, the most beautiful girl in Prague: the Ferrari Dino Girl. The film consists of two parts: the reconstructed past, and the unique document of the Soviet invasion previously used in part in Němec’s 1968 film Oratorio For Prague.’ — iffr

Trailer

 

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The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street (2016)
‘The Wolf From Royal Vineyard Street is a typically uncompromising final reckoning from Czech director Jan Nemec who died in March 2016, aged 79. Provocative to the last, he revisits key moments from his life with a dash of bravado and an urge to set down his memories from the front line of history.

‘There is a little settling of scores along the way and an exuberance that matches the swashbuckling spirit of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s recent trips down memory lane in The Dance Of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016). Entertaining and informative, the film is essential viewing for movie buffs and should encourage those audiences to seek out screenings of Nemec’s films.

‘Nemec gives the impression that his career never recovered from all the tumult of 1968 and his subsequent exile in Germany. Self-pity seems foreign to his nature but there is a melancholic air of unfulfilled hopes in his subsequent life in America where he earned a living as the director of wedding videos and from teaching.’ — Screen Daily

Trailer

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Milk, Hi, Milk. They’re not children, they’re legal, their sadness just makes them look childlike. Yeah, I think I’m going to go back to a Hartley film too and see what’s what. That’s a sad state of affairs: your friends’ seeming need for speed and messaging. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, he was hit crossing the street in front of Beyond Baroque where he was going for some event, which is very eerie to me. ‘Sissy-Boy Slap Party’ was embedded in full in the post, but thank you the add. I can’t do that with the Trow post because the blog is locked down through the third week of March and that post is still alive and active (27,000+ hits when I checked), but what I’ve done is move your guest-post forward from this week to the 18th, which makes total sense, I think, and the next time I go out of town, whereupon I post reruns rather than restorations, I’ll re-up the Trow. ** Bill, Yes, very sad. He was still writing at his powers’ peak too. I have seen ‘Speaking Parts’, but I’m hardly remembering it this morning. Worth a revisit? The Russian twinks are still out there, but now only on sites that are the porn site equivalent of thrift shops. My weekend was all right. Crazy wind and rain storms here. Pretty wild. And yours? ** Misanthrope: Thought you might: Mokhorev. Ha ha, Kinkade jigsaws, that’s kind of cool for some reason. Places to start. Not sure if there’s a Chalamet one, but you could have one custom made from your fave TC pic via various sites out there for almost pennies. Yeah, I get you on the excessive mourning thing. I guess I’m so utterly fed up with people posting aggravating, scared, angry, fear-mongering, etc. crap that even insta-sadness feels fresh. Glad your pain bursts aren’t stopping your editing efforts. Any title candidates? ** Sypha, Hi. Ha ha, yeah, it’s crazy how many sad Russian twink porn star posts there are mouldering in the old blog’s ruins. Right, gotcha. What a curious fear. What an interesting theory that death would turn everything upside down. Nice. They were total smarty-pants, those ancient Egyptians. And stylish as fuck. ** Steve Erickson, Cool. I hope the visibility isn’t just a fluke. Glad to hear he has a new and actual film coming out. The interview was fascinating, thank you for sharing that. Excellent about the Brooklyn Rail gig. Such a good venue. ** _Black_Acrylic, Do it. (Millhauser quote). ‘Dogtooth’ is one of those films I’ve meaning to watch for ages. I really need to start putting things on post-its and planting them somewhere. Sounds worthy. ** Okay. Do you know (of) the films of Jan Němec? Well, if you don’t, after today you have no excuse. See you tomorrow.

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‘A Video-Enhanced Grave Marker (VEGM) is a Western-style tombstone equipped with weatherproofed video playback that is initiated by remote control. Through sound and video, VEGMs make visits to graveyards an interactive experience. The high tech tombstones are currently offered by FuneralOne, a company based in St. Clair, Michigan.

‘The VEGM, invented by Robert Barrows of San Mateo, California, allows its owner to record messages to be played to loved ones or to any visitor to the site with a remote control. The stones are equipped with weatherproofed video playback and recording devices plus memory systems and a television monitor placed within a weather-proofed, hollowed-out headstone. As of May 2005, Barrows estimated that the costs of the VEGMs started at about USD$8000 to $10,000.

‘Barrows commented soon after its invention: “I envision being able to walk through a cemetery using a remote control, clicking on graves and what all the people buried there have to say. They can say all
the things they didn’t have the opportunity or guts to say when they were alive.”

‘To overcome noise pollution objections, the audio can also be transmitted to wireless headsets, made available by the cemetery’s office. Commenting on the threat from thieves or vandals Barrows adds, “There are very strict laws against vandalizing tombstones, and if you are going to vandalize a tombstone, you’d better hope there are no such things as ghosts.”

‘The issue of censorship is a serious concern with VEGMs. How high a level of free speech can be offered to the eventually deceased is undecided.’ — Toronto Star

 

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The Family International was founded by claimed prophetic leader David Berg in 1968 in Huntington Beach, California, USA. It sprang from the Jesus Movement of the late 1960s, with many of its early converts drawn from the hippie movement. Due to its unusual emphasis on total commitment, it triggered the first organized anticult group (FREECOG), and the unconventional sexual practices which soon followed within the Children of God solidified its place among the movements prompting the cult controversy of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe.

As The Family grew and expanded around the world, so did its message—salvation, apocalypticism, spiritual “revolution” against the outside world they called “the System”—and resultant controversy. During the early to mid 1970s, the group initiated several radical methods of evangelism, including Flirty Fishing—using sex to show God’s love and win converts and support.

Today, The Family’s leadership is headed by Berg’s widow Karen Zerby, under whom the group has both bowed to several reforms and initiated additional unconventional doctrines, including the “Loving Jesus revelation” which encourages members from the age of 14 to engage in a sexual relationship with Jesus. (cont.)

Cult Killer: The Rick Rodriguez Story

00:00
Text on screen: Cutting Edge
Rick Rodriguez: Well hey everyone, this is Rick and I am making this video.
Text on screen: January 7th, 2005
Text on screen: This is rick’s suicide note
Rick: I want there to be some record, my ideas, just who I was really
00:32
Text on screen: Rick was born into a religious cult
Rick: Hope I don’t fuck up and do something stupid and blow my nose off instead of my fucking head.

 

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Sad Russian porn stars

 

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‘Disco Design Ltd. (former name Pit Project Ltd.) was established in 2000 by Peter Yordanov, who has been the director and designer of our company. Before this time, Peter was a famous DJ in Bulgaria, and throughout Europe. During his journeys within the continent, he noticed that there is not much interior feeling in the Nightclubs. He has had a lot of ideas about designing clubs, and making people feel more comfortable.

‘With his profound experience of the nightclub industry, prosperous creativity, and sedulous thirst of knowledge, Peter has developed a unique policy of his company. After designing and renovating more than 100 clubs in unique full custom designs, he has experienced a constantly growing interest for his offers by potential clients.

‘Responding to this demand, he concentrated on the development of a new range of articles – SMART PRODUCTS for nightclub and bar design applications drawn by a stylish look – that has been registered community design by Peter Yordanov – but allowing an easy installation within a few days by any night club team usually leaded by an electrician. The appreciation by the public has been overwhelming!’ — disco-designer.com

 

—-

 

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The Man Who Stopped Writing
by Andrew Gallix

Marc-Edouard Nabe has always relished playing with fire, but never more so than when he burned what would have been the fifth volume of his journal. His main motivation was to avoid being trapped in a Shandyesque race with time, ending up pigeonholed as a diarist. Nevertheless, he went on to describe this event in Alain Zannini (2002), a novel so blatantly autobiographical that it even bore his real name as its title (Nabe, short for “nabot” — midget — is a nom de plume). The implication was clear: having lived his life in order to narrate it, Zannini had gradually become Nabe’s creation. What, then, would happen if the writer were to stop writing?

This ontological question is raised in L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire (“The Man Who Stopped Writing”), which begins with the author-narrator’s paradoxical assertion — given the length of the book, let alone its very existence — that he has forsaken literature after being dropped by his publisher. “A publisher paying me to write books nobody reads,” he deadpans, “I thought this would go on for ever.”

For the best part of two decades, the real-life Nabe had received a monthly wage from Les Editions du Rocher, but this stipend was suddenly withdrawn when they were bought out in 2005. The novelist responded by taking legal action. Throughout the lengthy lawsuit, he expressed himself by means of posters, which his hardcore supporters pasted all over the walls of France’s major cities. He also maintained the fiction that his authorial days were over, so as to remain in character while secretly writing his novel about writing no more.

The appearance of L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire thus came as quite a surprise, not least because Nabe chose to go down the self-publishing, or rather “anti-publishing”, route. The minimalist jet-black cover has a whiff of piracy about it: no barcode, no ISBN, no publisher’s name or logo; the spine remains bare. On the front, the author’s name is reduced to “Nabe” as if it had become a brand, and on the back you only find a number, indicating that it is the author’s twenty-eighth published work (and seventh novel). The book is only available through an official website and a handful of highly unlikely retailers (a butcher’s, a florist’s, a hairdresser’s and three restaurants at the last count). By cutting out the middleman, Nabe claims to be able to make a 70% profit, instead of the usual 10%, on each copy sold. The initial print run — funded by the sale of paintings (Nabe is also an artist and jazz guitarist) — sold out within a month; there have been three more since. Last year, the novel was shortlisted for the prestigious Renaudot prize — a first for a self-published volume in France — and last month, the online platform morphed into a full-blown company.

This declaration of war on the publishing industry is in keeping with Nabe’s image as an écrivain maudit. “Great artists,” says the protagonist, as Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil manuscript is auctioned off at Sotheby’s, “have but one purpose: to become moral alibis for the bastards of posterity”. Initially accused of being a crypto-fascist (partly because of his predilection for Céline and Lucien Rebatet), Nabe is now frequently depicted as a pro-Palestinian leftist (whose anti-Americanism, it must be said, borders on the pathological). His first television appearance, in 1985, proved so incendiary that he was beaten up by a leading anti-racist campaigner. Every day, he declared — looking every inch the provocative young fogey, complete with centre parting, bow tie and retro spectacles — I shoot up with a Montblanc pen full of “utter hatred of humanity”. A great admirer of Jacques Mesrine, Nabe famously befriended the flamboyant bankrobber Albert Spaggiari as well as the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Following 9/11, he produced a pamphlet entitled Une Lueur d’espoir (“A Glimmer of Hope”) and argued repeatedly that bin Laden was only acting in self-defence. In 2003, he even travelled to Baghdad, where he protested against the invasion of Iraq in typically Gallic fashion: by writing a novel. These antics may have earned him a large cult following, but Mazarine Pingeot summed up the views of many when she declared that Nabe was “unfortunately” a great writer.

Despite running to almost 700 pages, L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire has no chapters or even paragraphs, as though it were shot in real time, like 24, the American TV series the narrator watches. If the dialogue is a little didactic — even Socratic — at times, there are far fewer purple passages than usual. This is the affectless, almost pedestrian, prose of someone who will not even allow himself to sign an autograph or compose a letter any more. The novel is meant to read as if it were unwritten. This tonal blankness (often reminiscent of Houellebecq’s) is marred on occasion by poor punning, but it can also be shot through with flashes of sheer poetry: a vintage sewing machine is likened to a “giant bee in mourning”; a brunette’s hair looks like it has been “soaked in liquid night”.

(cont.)

Marc-Édouard Nabe Website
Marc-Édouard Nabe Fansite
Marc-Édouard Nabe Video Playlist
Marc-Édouard Nabe @ goodreads

 

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‘Viewing Maddin’s Sissy Boy Slap Party for the first time I was amazed. It came out of nowhere and with a stunning pace proceeded to race with a blistering pace towards a climax of frenzied editing and then come crashing down again united nothing more than by the lines of an old man with a bike. The images and story, if it can be called that, are definitely homo-erotic and simplistic, but they are irrelevant to appreciate what one website called a “micromontage” of furious sound and sight. Sissy Boy possesses the Guy Maddin trademark references to silent, obscure films and their makers. Visually it might be the equivalent of turning on a foreign language radio station or television program or turning off the subtitles of a film and finding yourself totally lost from a narrative perspective. It becomes a form of rhythm and the words and sounds take on their own quality quite apart from any meaning. But the early cinematic techniques don’t necessarily have the problem of reference that an unfamiliar language would have. The early film makers were trying to tell a story and invented many techniques to visually do so. Maddin is, then, like some Frankenstein who cuts them up, shocks them with electricity, and brings them back to life if only as echoey shadows.’ — Kuro5hin

 

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‘Susan Hiller’s Witness (2000) takes the form of a darkened room in which hundreds of loudspeakers hang, at various heights, some out of reach to all but the tallest of visitors, catching the light from a ring of lights at the centre of the work and beams directed into the centre from the edges (in the chapel the external light came from windows masked in blue). Entering the space, it’s immediately apparent that the cacophony of voices that fills the room emanates from the speakers. Getting closer it becomes clear that the voices speak in many languages and that each voice tells a story – a true story – of an encounter with a UFO or similarly unexplained phenomenon. At times the cacophony dies down and a single voice fills the room. Spookily, this always seems to be the voice you were already listening to. The stories are ones Hiller found on the internet; they are given voice for the installation, spoken in their original language. Some are recent, others decades old. Some are from named sources, others anonymous. Many start with a disclaimer indicating that the storyteller expects to be disbelieved.’ — Ann Jones, Mostly Film

 

_____________

‘The novel wants to sweep everything into its mighty embrace — shores, mountains, continents. But it can never succeed, because the world is vaster than a novel, the world rushes away at every point. The novel leaps restlessly from place to place, always hungry, always dissatisfied, always fearful of coming to an end — because when it stops, exhausted but never at peace, the world will have escaped it. The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the short story feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the novel. It becomes as big as the universe. Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power. The ponderous mass of the novel strikes it as the laughable image of weakness. The short story apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.’ — Steven Millhauser

 

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i am Richard Ziegler a 13 year old in New Zealand and i came across a video of someone who made there own roller coaster so i decided to make my own.
the track is 30 cm and 45 cm wide with 2 or 3 15 cm planks side by side
its 65 cm tall at the start and has already been extended to 18 meters and still has about 10 meters to go.
it goes over 10 kph at some points and will end up going up to twice this speed when complete.
it is still a work in progress and has had about 2-3 weeks of work on it
hope you like it
total cost FREE all wood and side rails came from under our house
YES IT IS A ROLLER COASTER AS IT ROLL’S AND COASTS
and its better than some people who make these like a skateboard on a drive way

 

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Evgeny Mokhorev

 

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‘One of France’s most original actresses, Bernadette Lafont embodies many of the contradictions of French film since the war. She is both sexy and rather plain, ditsy ebullient and quite serious, tremendously creative and yet limited by her very Frenchness in a world dominated by the Hollywood movie machine. Famously associated with New Wave directors, Lafont has in a tumultuous life done a bit of everything, from television movies to the stage, never quite the megastar but always a strong presence, smart and messed up all at the same time.’ — Katherine Knorr

 

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Piet Zwarte

 

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Rock

Hit absolute rock bottom
Are you there rock? No?

No rock on bottom

— Joanne Kyger

_______________

‘Following the development of Total Audio Works for the award-winning theatre installation Hotel Gasten, Liseberg Park, Gotenberg (1999), I was commissioned to devise a sonic environment for a ‘walk and ride-through’ drama, Transdemonium, Parc Asterix. In most thematic applications audiences are pulsed through the score at predetermined intervals to synchronise with actors, animatronics and drama. Sound and music effects are triggered in isolation with no thematic thread between sequences. TAW is designed as 48 points of looped audio, each broadcast simultaneously and discretely mapped to 48 strategically positioned speakers. This uniquely enables an audience to explore a sonic environment in their own time, auditioning the sound as if travelling through a symphony – with the freedom to move forwards or backwards through the score – the drama unfolding in a more natural organic form.

‘TAW was developed using looped digital music samples (as generative music for games) but sequenced as a non-linear-through-score. One sequence required the power of prayer to be symbolised as aspiring to a higher and higher spiritual order manifested in the audience physically rising upwards through a 30m spiral. Conventional multi-point immersive audio confines listeners to exploring sound fields within the single horizontal plane. There are instances where sonic artists configure gallery installations in the vertical, but none has through-scored music.

‘The challenge was to create a soundtrack of multiple harmonic Gregorian phrases that rendered the sensation of journeying upwards through a choral work made up of multiple layers of sonic strata. The final sound installation combined the principals of TAW, reconfigured in a vertical form, with five separate surround systems stacked at 6m levels. Transdemonium was the first public thematic experience with scored music for vertical surround. The first thematic experience to use original music composed and designed for a multiple stacked surround in a vertical configuration.’ — Guillaume de Marchant

 

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‘On Nov. 5, a Chinese blogger posted three photos of a young man in spiky hair for his 1.6 million followers on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter. “Caught a live shamate on the street today,” he wrote gleefully, adding that their hairstyles “look like the molecular structure of some virus.” Meanwhile, a music video called “Shamate Meets Wash-Cut-Blowdry,” a reference to the group’s often-maligned hairstyles, featuring leggy girls gyrating to the tune of Korean pop-singer Psy’s song “Gentleman,” has received more than 2.4 million views on Youku, China’s YouTube. (Predictably, comments to the video poked fun.) These shamate are the young migrants lost in China’s great urbanization push, a subculture whose numbers are unknown, but surely growing.

‘To hip Chinese sensibilities, shamate — named after a deliberately nonsensical transliteration of the English word “smart” — are anything but. Baidu Baike, China’s Wikipedia, describes a shamate as a young urban migrant from one of the tens of thousands of podunk towns scattered across China. These men and women are in their late teens or early 20s, often with middle-school educations and few marketable skills, working low-paying jobs in the big cities, like a barber, security guard, deliveryman, or waitress.

‘A shamate’s single most distinguishing (and derided) feature is his or her exaggerated hairstyle: curly perms, shaggy blow-outs, or spiky do’s, all held together with considerable abuse of hair coloring or wax. Clothing bought from a street market, some body piercing, and an off-brand cell phone often completes the look. Shamates usually linger in the social purgatory of small hair salons, smoky Internet cafes, or street market stalls in China’s big cities, not quite fitting into the world of shiny office buildings and expensive department stores that surrounds them.

‘Shamate’s outré fashion choices reflect something much deeper: collective alienation, a byproduct of China’s massive urban migration push and the country’s widening class divide. While roughly half of China’s 1.4 billion people live in cities, the consultancy McKinsey projects the number of urban residents to grow by more than 350 million in 2025; more than 240 million of those new additions will be migrants.’ — Tea Leaf Nation

 

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How to synchronize metronomes

 

________________

‘A New Zealand truck driver said he blew up like a balloon when he fell onto the fitting of a compressed air hose that pierced his buttock and forced air into his body at 100 pounds a square inch.

‘Steven McCormack was standing on his truck’s foot plate Saturday when he slipped and fell, breaking a compressed air hose off an air reservoir that powered the truck’s brakes. He fell hard onto the brass fitting, which pierced his left buttock and started pumping air into his body.

‘”I felt the air rush into my body and I felt like it was going to explode from my foot,” he told local media from his hospital bed in the town of Whakatane, on North Island’s east coast. “I was blowing up like a football. I had no choice but just to lay there, blowing up like a balloon.”

‘McCormack’s workmates heard his screams and ran to him, quickly releasing a safety valve to stop the air flow, said Robbie Petersen, co-owner of the trucking company. He was rushed to the hospital with terrible swelling and fluid in one lung. Doctors said the air had separated fat from muscle in McCormack’s body, but had not entered his bloodstream. McCormack said his skin felt “like a pork roast” – crackling on the outside but soft underneath.’ — The New Zealander

 

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‘The internet is the only reality where one can copy a gravestone infinitely. Above is a architectural orphan as a framed area, as a gravestone ripped from my cyber-territorialized self elsewhere. Below I give its copied bits a resting place.

‘The process behind this work is a simplistic, non-obtrusive and intangible media technology hacking with an abstract artistic result. As in a petri dish one can culture microorganisms, these works are a culture of media. I have entitled this technology “architectural orphans:” abstractions of ubiquitous but ignored nooks, cracks or micro objects in otherwise often visited locales.

‘The photograph was taken in a guerrilla-styled low-profile manner. Error upon error, while not creating inferiority but rather establishing grounds for new creations; new artistic life. Their oddity of spacial sensation is abstractly and “organically” created by the deconstruction and recontextualization of the source (i.e ripping away granite and shadows into small contrasting strips of minute color and flattened texture) and the “hacking” of the media.

‘The source image was used as raw material within an organically following editorial process. From a linear techno-centric point of view this process evolved in an unorthodox manner; a manner unintended for the surface purposes of the used media (i.e. the standard software & hardware of the used mobile machinery). The unorthodoxy lies in the fact that this source was manipulated by using this 1 technology in a manner it was not supposed to be used (in this case the simple camera function within an iPhone).

‘I enjoy the tension between the image’s banal heritage (i.e a gravestone) and the mysterious abstraction it resulted into.’ — Jan Aminasuri

 

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4 from Game Art, unlimited.

GameScenes is your one-way ticket to the Game Artworld.
Background info: Originally, a videoludica’s channel, GameScenes.
A full-fledged blog (!) since 2009.
Written and edited by Matteo Bittanti.
Key contributor: Mathias Jansson.

1. Game Art: William Huber’s “Ludological dynamics of Fatal Frame 2” (2010)

William Huber visualizes the ludological interactions in Fatal Frame 2 (Tecmo, 2001). In his project, Huber applied “cultural analytic techniques to identify the transitions in modes of gameplay, in order to characterize the mechanics for generating suspense and uncanny aesthetic experience in a videogame.” Full description of the fascinating research project here.

Link: William Huber
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti (via Software Studies)
__

 

2. Game Art: William Huber and Lev Manovich “Kingdom Hearts Visualizations” ( 2009-2010)

“This project represents nearly 100 hours of playing two videogames as high resolution visualizations. This representation allows us to study the interplay of various elements of gameplay, and the relationship between the travel through game spaces and the passage of time in game play. […] The data are the game play sessions of the video games Kingdom Hearts (2002, Square Co., Ltd.) and Kingdom Hearts II (2005, Square-Enix, Inc.) Each game was played from the beginning to the end over a number of sessions. The video captured from all game sessions of each game were assembled into a singe sequence. The sequences were sampled at 6 frames per second. This resulted in 225,000 frames for Kingdom Hearts and 133,000 frames for Ki
ngdom Hearts II. The visualizations use only every 10th frame from the complete frame sets:Kingdom Hearts: 22,500 frames. Kingdom Hearts II: 13,300 frames.” (William Huber)

Link: William Huber and Lev Manovich’s Game Visualizations
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti (via Software Studies)
__

 

3. BOOK: Gracie Kendal’s “1000+ Avatars Vol. 1 and 2” (2011)

1000+ Avatars a self-Published book by Kristine Schomaker, 2011.
Edited by Nickola Martynov, With contributions by Garrett Cobarr and Patrick Millard
Design by Kristine Schomaker
English, 10” x 8”, 160 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-0-9836572-2-4

Gracie Kendal, aka Kristine Schomaker is a Los Angeles based new media and performance artist, painter, and art historian. He latest project is called 1000+ Avatars, “a contemporary anthropology of portraits of avatars in the virtual world of Second Life”. The portraits explore the idea of the avatar as a constructed online identity and deals with fluid notions of anonymity, personality, and diversity. This project is somehow reminiscent of Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego: Avatars and their Creators (2007).

Link: Gracie Kendal’s 1000+ Avatars
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti
__

 

4. Video: Nicholas Tilly’s reportage of the Atopic Machinima Festival 2011

Credits: Nicholas Tilly
Link: Atopic Film Festival 2011
Submitted by Matteo Bittanti

 

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Sunday in the Storm Era

“these are extraordinary times”
—so we can do whatever we want ha ha

—the sky darkens
—stitching the white pillow cover

—If I had my way I’d sit and watch
—the grey and poundy waves all day …

—-The candle lights for Cypress
—must be down at the channel now
—where the tide rushes out
–from the lagoon and keeps on going out

way out … remember?

——now the evening sky
—looks pretty clear
——————that
—was a history
—just happened

— Joanne Kyger

 

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5 bitchin’ robots

Coughing Robot Spews ‘Flu Germs’

Yaskawa Motoman plays taiko drums

CB2 baby humanoid robot

Japanese Crawling Robot

Modular robot reassembles when kicked apart

 

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‘Cats live in loneliness, then die like falling rain.’ — t.o.L

 

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‘In 1781, the scholar Friedrich Nicolai, luckier and more inquisitive than most, was permitted to examine the sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s small workshop on the bank of the Danube, the entire furniture of which consisted of a bed, a flute, a tobacco-pipe, a water pitcher, an old Italian book about human proportions and the drawing of an armless Egyptian statue. Messerschmidt, once assistant professor of sculpture at the Imperial Academy of Vienna, now necromancer and recluse, was in his forty-fifth year.

‘Since the onset of mental illness in 1771, Messerschmidt had neglected his work as a portraitist, though he still received and accepted occasional commissions, and had concentrated his great industry on the production of a series of heads of very strange aspect. Although he still received and accepted occasional commissions, he had concentrated his great industry on the production of a series of heads of very strange aspect.

‘Nicolai found him busy with the sixty-first of these heads. He observed that it, like all the rest, was a self-portrait. The sculptor worked in front of a mirror. Pinching himself from time to time under the lowest right rib, he would cut a terrifying grimace scrutinise his face in the mirror, sculpt, and after an interval of about half a minute repeat his grimace with remarkable precision.

‘When the courteous Nicolai asked him to explain his method, Messerschmidt, somewhat hesitatingly, gave him a confused account, the gist of which can be summed up as follows: although he had lived chastely since his youth, Messerschmidt was often visited by ghosts who caused him pains in the abdomen and thighs. Fortunately, he had managed to devise a system for warding off these tormentors.

‘This system was based on knowledge of universal proportions, learned through the study of the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistos—of whose armless statue he always kept a drawing about him. His knowledge of proportion gave Messerschmidt the power to resist the spirits. For all things have their proper proportion, and all effects come from a sufficient cause; whoever can reproduce in himself the proportions of another being should be able to produce effects equal to the effects of the other.

‘All this, in Messerschmidt’s opinion, amounted to a momentous discovery which, not surprisingly, had aroused the envy of the Spirit of Proportion, the chief of his ghostly persecutors. Undaunted by the pains which the spirit inflicted on him, he resolved to delve deeper into the mystery of proportion, in order to be victorious in this contest. By observing the pains which he felt in his lower body as he worked on the faces of his busts, he came to the conclusion that if he pinched himself in different parts of the body and accompanied this with grimaces which bore the exact Egyptian proportion to the pinch, he would reach perfection in the matter of proportion. Pleased with his system, Messerschmidt resolved to pass it on to posterity by means of his sculpted heads, of which he planned to execute sixty-four, since there were sixty-four canonical grimaces.

‘The third and largest group of heads, comprising 54 busts at the time of Nicolai’s visit, consisted of the convulsively grimacing heads which are still the best known of the series. All seemed to be self-portraits. Nicolai noticed that in many of them the mouths were tightly shut and the lips drawn in so as to form a thin line. Messerschmidt explained this curious feature by pointing out that men should not show the red of their lips, since animals never showed theirs—and animals, as he reminded his visitor, were superior to men in their perception of the hidden aspects of nature.

‘Messerschmidt was neither in tune with his time, nor entirely alienated from it. His artistic personality was injured, but not debilitated, by sickness; the conflict within him irritated his imagination and concentrated his energies: it was the fortunate flaw which raised his later above his earlier works and above those of his more ordinary contemporaries. Messerschmidt was able to combine representation with rigid stylisation, expression with abstract pattern, and preserve, at the same time, both the anatomical structure and the character of portrait. To bring these divergent elements into harmony was the work of a powerful artistic intelligence.’ — Lorenz Eitner, The Grand Eccentrics

 

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‘A new messaging service called The Last Messages Club that will send your family and friends pre-written emails when you kick the bucket launched in the UK this week.

‘Members can write up to 100 emails that can be released once they die and at times of their choosing, such as when a loved one marries or has a child.

‘Each member gets a secure and private vault where they are able to create messages to be sent specifically to their chosen recipient.

‘The vault can also store photos, videos and documents for access by pre-selected family, friends or colleagues.

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Pierre Guyotat, the last of the great genius visionary French writers, old but tragically cut down when still in his prime. ** Milk, Hi, Milk, welcome! Did you? Did it hold up? ** JM, Hey Josiah. Ah, sleep issues, fuck, that can murderous, don’t I know it too. The script and proposal for the TV series is now on the desks of the ARTE honchos in Strasbourg, and we’re supposed to get a green or red light in mid-March. I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be accepted or killed, it’s really hard to tell at this point. As I’m sure I’ve said, counselling helped me a strangely large amount back when I needed and did it, and I still can’t figure why it worked. Man, I hope everything that’s overly encroaching backs off as soon as possible. Luckily, they don’t call ‘rough patches’ patches for no reason. Oh, but new writing by you! I’m excited to read it! Thank you, and congrats. Everyone, the superb writer and more Josiah Morgan has a new shortish prose piece newly up online and fully readable. It’s always a 100% treat to read his work, so take a little time this weekend and do so, won’t you? Here. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, I’m very looking forward to that film. Let me share your enthusiastic recommendation. Everyone, Here’s Mr. Ehrenstein with a passionate tip: ‘While it was put together a couple of years back The Times of Bill Cunningham is just being released theatrically now. Under no circumstances should it be missed. This documentary about the unique fashion observer-guru-photographer captures his sublime personality – part giddy teenager, part en Master Supreme — perfectly. There was a film made about him several years back before he passed away that showed him racing about on his bike taking pictures of New Yorkers both famous and unknown entirely for the clothes they wore. He firmly believd what we wore on the outside expressed what was on our inside. And he finds beauty and innovation in everyone from Mr. Astor (a she turned 100) to downtown drag artiste Kenny Kenny. He’s full of joy throughout save for one moment when he speaks mournfully of those he loved that he lost to AIDS . He bows his head and sobs. But only for a moment as he quickly bounces back to join the world. Bill Cunningham loved life and he loved people. He’s a very special hero of mine — right alongside the equally idiosyncratic — and joyous — Oliver Sacks.’ ** Sypha, Hi. That is a most strange and interesting reveal about the ancient Egyptians. Is there an explanation for why they seemed to be so fixated on their waste disposing? ** wolf, Wolf!!! Hm, okay, I see. I saw the doc about Lynch and wasn’t that excited by it. I saw him give a talk once, and that was quite exciting. Maybe that’s enough. What’s your weekend holding out for you or, I guess, what was in its grubby held out paws? Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Wow, it’s Generator Members Show time again? Time does fly. Scary. Those collage and performance snaps do look charismatic even in your lens. Fun. Have a sweet weekend. ** Steve Erickson, Oh, yes, I remember your Oskouei retrospective now. My head was out in space. I haven’t seen a Hal Hartley film in fucking forever. Interesting. Everyone, Steve E. interviews the American auteur filmmaker Hal Hartley, and it should be very interesting read, so … read up, yes? ** Bill, Hi. I didn’t realise that she was such a good interview. I read a few when making that post, and she’s relentlessly amusing. I’ll look out for the R.L. Cagle book. I’m reading the book of Tony Conrad’s writings, and it’s very excellent. ** Okay. This weekend I resurrect another of my old Varioso posts, which, as I’ve explained previously, consist of things that interested me but didn’t seem to warrant an entire post to themselves. Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff for you to pore over between and Monday if you feel like it. Enjoy stuff. See you on Monday.